THE FIRST RECIPE CREATED WITH THE HELP OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE OR HOW TO MULTIPLY CULINARY CREATIVITY TENFOLD

In collaboration with Chef Romain Fornell of Caelis 1*, Barcelona, during the Madrid Fusión conference in Madrid.

A tireless innovator, François Chartier with the SONY AI Gastronomy team, pioneered the use of artificial intelligence (A.I.) for the benefit of gastronomy. This approach was inspired by his collaboration with the SONY A.I. AND GASTRONOMY Research Committee set up by a team of scientists from Sony Corporation in Tokyo, where he sits since January 2019 on the research committee as a main consultant. He presented with SONY AI researchers, this approach on January 14, 2020, in front of more than 1000 chefs from everywhere in the world at Madrid Fusión, the leading culinary trade event for innovation.

François Chartier began his presentation by explaining how SONY has allowed many artists to give free rein to their creativity and imagination since its foundation, whether they are musicians, visual artists, film producers or video game creators. Now, the company is putting its technological knowledge at the service of gastronomy, with François Chartier’s help, by creating SONY AI division in 2019. SONY AI expert Michael Spranger puts the colossal work undertaken with François Chartier on this project into context: “For a whole year, we took the A.I. tools we use for music and combined them with François’ knowledge of gastronomy to create a system that would facilitate the creation of recipes, FOR BOTH PROFESSIONAL AND AMATEUR CHEFS.”

For the team behind this endeavour, it has been a lengthy process, a “work in progress”. The audience, made up of chefs, sommeliers and journalists, were eager to see A.I. at the service of culinary creativity in action… The demonstration orchestrated by François Chartier was not long in coming.

Humans at the heart of the project

François Chartier’s goal during the demonstration was to create a dialogue with Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) by demonstrating how he could interact with the machine to develop a completely original recipe idea. He insisted from the beginning of the demonstration: “Make no mistake, without a creator guiding the artificial intelligence, the recipe does not exist.” 

The initial concept for our tireless researcher was simple: pretend we are in Japan creating a soy sauce-based dish. But, during the dialogue established with A.I., the concept evolved to include the use of Cacao Barry’s Ruby fermented chocolate, an exceptional new product. Since François Chartier didn’t want to use the chocolate in a dessert and also requested a crunchy texture for his creation, A.I. suggested some new solutions: instead of working with the original proposal (maple syrup, Sichuan pepper, curry), it proposed using roasted asparagus, coffee and roasted chili peppers. But François Chartier also wanted to give A.I. an extra challenge: he wanted his dish to have a different, crunchy texture. A.I. quickly adapted and offered him a third option: dehydrated cauliflower like couscous that would be roasted, nori seaweed and sea urchin to accompany the Ruby chocolate; new ingredients for a new kind of dish! As you can see, the creator was in constant interaction with the machine, which, in turn, offered him distinct tastes and cultural paths for his dish.

Local, seasonal, eco-friendly

But the experiment didn’t stop there. A.I. factored in the use of local ingredients as an essential approach for cooks around the world. It respects the work of producers from a specific region, the environment and the seasonal nature of the products by using short supply chains. Consequently, at the conference held in Madrid, it proposed replacing French camembert intended initially for the recipe by the A.I. system with Catalan Tou del Tillers cheese, and Sichuan pepper with pimenton, a Spanish smoke-dried sweet pepper powder.